Proof of Life by Daniel Levin; Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; 2021; ISBN 9781643-750989; 263 pages, $26.95.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – I jumped into this book without reading the introduction and believed right through the end that I was reading a well-crafted, highly believable suspense novel. In fact, Daniel Levin had written a memoir about his efforts to find out what had happened to a young man who had disappeared in Syria. He didn’t know the young man, but as a favor to a friend, he had promised to make inquiries.
Those inquiries set Levin on a twisted path. A board member of the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, he already had friends in the Middle East, who had friends who could introduce him to their friends. And following this serpentine route, Levin, who is Jewish, met with a powerful sheikh in Beirut, Lebanon, and a notorious trafficker of drugs and sex slaves in Dubai, all in an effort to locate the missing young man.
As one might expect, these were not the situations that Jews with telltale surnames often find themselves in, so it was on more than one occasion Levin felt his heart in his mouth as he diligently sought to ferret out information. Taking prodigious notes about his high-tension meetings, and even recording some conversations surreptitiously, Levin was able in his book to portray a sense that in the Middle East everything comes with a price, even information.
He also was able to convey the moods and lifestyles of the people he met. I was fascinated by a description one intermediary gave him about Dubai, in essence, that it was a city where everyone felt the need to exaggerate. “A man cannot just be financially secure or even wealthy, he has to be a billionaire of billionaires; he cannot just be intelligent, he has to be a generational genius who predicted every financial or political event years before it took place,” and so forth.
In addition, Levin was able to depict the incredible cruelty of the sex traffic trade, in which young girls are taken from their parents, put in brothels, and forever afterwards are slaves unless by some stroke of luck they are able to escape that life without being murdered for their attempt.
Proof of Life is a fast read, even with voluminous footnotes which should have tipped me off immediately that this was a memoir not a novel. Be that as it may, I enjoyed reading it, and think many San Diego Jewish World readers will too.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com